The Wanderers by Meg Howrey

Author:Meg Howrey
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-02-07T15:23:39+00:00

LUKE

You missed it,” Luke says. “Yoshi started screaming at Sergei after Sergei gave away the ending to Doctor Zhivago. And then Helen started crying and went to the bathroom and gave herself bangs.”

“Ha ha.” Nari thunks herself down in the chair next to Luke and holds out a plate of cookies. “The party is raging in Mission Control. People are doing traditional wassail and there’s a snow machine.”

On the screens in front of them, the astronauts are cleaning up after their special Christmas feast and will go to bed soon. It is almost midnight, Primitus time.

Four in the afternoon, Earth time. Luke is struggling. His circadian rhythms look like a Jackson Pollock painting. It affects them all a little differently, and Luke—to his shame—is sensitive.

He’s also been up for eighteen hours, working for sixteen of them. Since today was a free day for the astronauts—no training, no sims—it was a full day for observing social and recreation time. Two members of the Obber team drew Christmas vacation, so they’re down to four. Luke and Nari have spent the day watching the most hypnotically boring reality channel on Earth.

It was a joke among the Obbers. “You can’t look away,” they said. “It’s mesmerizingly dull. It’s Chekhov in space.”

According to the astronauts, the astronauts were fine! They were happy as tinned clams. They answered every question, filled out every questionnaire, filed every personal report with monotonous cheer. No, they were not stressed. Yes, they felt engaged. No, there were no conflicts. Yes, they were sleeping. They liked the food. Their health was good. They missed their families at entirely appropriate levels that were absolutely manageable. Occasionally, an astronaut would submit thoughtful ideas on small modifications to their situation or equipment. Sergei would be brief and cheerful in his punctuation selection; Yoshi was exquisitely polite; Helen sent them under the heading: Things to Think About.

According to the face and voice scanners, the astronauts were not always fine, but the Obbers were still struggling to read these. The astronauts switched languages a lot in casual conversation, and their facial expressions changed according to language, as did the pitch and tone of their voices. Additionally, they sometimes spoke to one another while engaged in another task, and might be reacting to the task, or the person. They chatted for hours about technical things Luke could barely follow.

Aristotle had written that it was easy to become angry—the difficulty was in being angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way. Put like that, it seemed not just difficult but impossible.

It was not difficult for the astronauts.

Helen only expressed anger toward herself, but did not appear to dwell on it. Yoshi allowed himself to express anger at current events, but he always did a meditation after looking at the news uplinks, and that was that. Sergei pretended to be angry for comic effect or as an anger scapegoat for the crew and otherwise waited until he was no longer angry to express anger.

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